Jochen asked whether the order made sense. It did not -- it followed when
things happened to be decided, which after consolidation is fictional anyway
since record 5 alone folds decisions taken across a week.
Concretely wrong before: the domain statement sat at 8, after five engineering
rules; the constitution was scattered across 5, 12 and 17; the tiers landed at
15, 16, 21 and 22 with process records in between.
Now it walks: what the mesh is (1-3), its tiers from the bottom up (4-8), what
runs on them and how it gets there (9-10), how it is built (11-16), how it is
checked (17-18), how we work (19-23).
Two things made this safe rather than free. It is a permutation, not a
compaction, so the renames go through temporary names -- otherwise two files
want one slot and one is lost. And the reference rewrite is a single
simultaneous pass, because almost every number moved into a slot another number
was vacating; replacing one at a time would have cascaded and pointed things at
the wrong record while still resolving.
Verified: 284 [ADR NNNN](path) links across the repository, all with matching
text and target.
The ordering principle is now stated in 19 rather than left implicit -- the
repository already said "the numbering is the flow" about its folders, and
there was no reason for the records to be the exception.
The consolidation left a sparse sequence -- 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 18,
19, 25, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 58 -- where the gaps were only
the archaeology of what used to be there.
Renumbered contiguously. Renames run in ascending order, so every target number
is already free and no two files ever collide.
The reference rewrite is one simultaneous pass rather than a sequence of
replacements. Numbers moved into slots other numbers were vacating -- the node
host went 37 to 16 while the lab went 16 to 9 -- so replacing one at a time
would have cascaded and silently pointed things at the wrong record.
Seven plain-text references survived the merges as prose rather than links,
naming records that no longer existed: the enrolment token, the link boundary,
what a declaration is, reachability, the repository structure. Each mapped to
the consolidated record that now holds it.
Verified rather than assumed: every [ADR NNNN](path) link now has matching text
and target, checked across the whole repository, and the checker passes.
Frontmatter `consolidates:` lists dropped -- they named records that are gone,
and each consolidated record already says in prose what it absorbed.
HQ held only the to-be. Every reader had to already know the system the
decisions were about, and an as-is claim had nowhere to live except inside
an intention.
Adds 02-DESIGN/00-as-is — eleven documents written from the implementation
and the operational record, not from intent, including the parts nobody
would choose again. The two existing designs move under 01-to-be. Layers
are declared in frontmatter and never mix: a design that ships does not
move, its as-is counterpart is written, and both stand.
Back-fills adr/0001-0014 for decisions taken in implementation and never
recorded — the broker, the module abstraction, the mesh database, managed
files, provisioning, migrations, the workspace removal, failing loudly,
the constitution, application placement, linking, the employee model, the
artifact, the three silos. Each marked reconstructed, dated from the
history, and citing the evidence it was recovered from. The two existing
records renumber to 0015 and 0016 so the ledger runs oldest first;
0017 extends 0015 to modules outside the core, principle only — the
domain list is deliberately not invented here.
how-we-build.md becomes the source of the mesh constitution, with a sync
playbook, so the enforced copy stops being the only one that is true.
Process becomes explicit: five playbooks, eight thin skills that defer to
them, a repository map, and AGENTS.md with CLAUDE.md as its include.
The five Observations become 04-ISSUES 001-005 where they can be owned and
closed. 006 is new and uncomfortable: HQ is not indexed into the knowledge
base. That claim is what decision 27 rests on, it was never checked, and
the README now says so instead of repeating it.
Also corrects the ADR index into something generated, the "02-DESIGN is
empty" claim, the VISION.md pointer that did not survive the repo split,
and a note asserting the symlink rule was contradicted — it was a
misreading; the rule forbids hand-made links, the installer links by design.
What the mesh is, what it is becoming, and why. Implementation lives in the
code repositories; the reasoning lives here.
00-GENESIS mission, engineering context, effect, and the rules that hold
01-RESEARCH investigations, before they harden into design
02-DESIGN the authoritative specification
adr numbered decisions — what was chosen, and what was rejected
DECISIONS.md the ledger: every decision, in the order it was taken
Written for a reader who is not its author and has no access to the mesh it
describes. Addresses use the documentation ranges of RFC 5737 and RFC 1918;
nodes are named by role.
Single initial commit by intent. The prior history came from a private
repository and carried operational detail — a routable address identified as a
VPN hub, real domain names, a hosting provider — which sanitising a tip commit
would not have removed from the log.
jschoubben